DR SPIRE SSENTONGO: Dear police officers, I know that the humanity in you is not entirely dead, though terribly diminished

Dear police officers, welcome back from the day’s labour and anxiety

We understand the pain you must be enduring internally, having to arrest young boys and girls your children’s age – whom you clearly know are innocent. While you have to take the orders, deep within you are conflicted and wounded.

The pain could be read on some of your faces, even when you had to pretend for your bosses to see you working. I know many of you are aware that you too are victims of this corruption and extravagance of leaders that has eaten away our country to the core.

You wish to find and afford good healthcare. You wish to take your children to good schools too. You have dreams too, not to retire when you can only show your children and grandchildren elegant photos in uniform.

A uniform that may also painfully remind you, of how you obediently served to protect those who will have retired with square miles of land, buildings, palaces, children educated in the world’s best schools, and enough investments for the chronic illnesses of old age.

It pains you I know, going back home today, after arresting young boys and girls, who are only demanding for a more decent country for all of us; demanding for a country where all our pains matter. That’s their crime, for which they are remanded until 30th July.

You may quietly shed a tear, as you remove your sweaty uniform, to hang it on a rusty nail in your miserable shelter, where you will sleep like a vagabond – as those you labored to protect all day rest their important heads on imported soft fiber pillows on king-size beds.

I hope you will be able to sleep, as your children yawn under your beds, turning in-between utensils, and as your boots release the sweat of the long day in your direction. I can imagine your pain, as you chew on your posho and beans; while they are somewhere in Kololo toasting expensive wine glasses to an Anti-Corruption March gone. I hope you sustained no injuries.

You know, since you are the ones we encounter on the streets, we may very easily imagine you to be the problem. Our frustrations meet and we clash, like cows on a butcher’s truck. If they really cared, the money they steal and generously spend on themselves could make all our lives better.

But they chose to prioritize their importance. They positioned themselves right below angels in the hierarchy of importance of beings. From the hard-earned monies they squeeze from all of us in taxes, plus what they borrow, with us and our children as their securities, they reward themselves with palatial luxury.

I know it pains you traffic officer too, who takes the sun’s burning all day, plus rain and car fumes. We share the pain – including with those who might be deluded to get excited with the little powers functionally thrown at them to compensate for their existential miseries when real life knocks at their doors.

Sometimes the leader of prisoners may forget that he/she is a prisoner too, and perhaps get comfortable in prison. You know Afande, while we may count years, it’s too short a time we spend down here on this little planet. You’re living this minute, next minute you are gone.

We soon get equalized into nothingness, with nothing surviving but perhaps a soul. All our muscles rot. So, I often wonder, how we try to live as though we’re immortal. The most meaningful thing we can do with our short time here, is to increase each other’s happiness.

I don’t know how it feels, going back home, leaving someone else’s innocent child locked up in a tiny congested room. I know you cry. I know that the humanity in you is not entirely dead, though terribly diminished.

We cry too, seeing you getting turned into brutes. I hope that someday, we shall be able to sit together and talk about these pains as fellow human beings. I keep hope, for such a time. I increasingly doubt that I will be able to witness it, but I wish it for my children and yours. May we not labour and die in vain.

Be strong. May we find love.